Tightrope
by Matt G
Summary: Three months after quitting the Tok'ra - Rick is hired by Hammond for a one-off assignment in Germany.


22nd June 2002  
  
What's the connection between my 18th and 22nd birthdays? Answer: Both were celebrated in the pub watching England win a World Cup match. Both lunchtime kickoffs.  
  
For my 18th birthday it was a World Cup '98 group game - England 2 Tunisia 0.  
  
For my 22nd the match being played on the other side of the world - England 3 Denmark 0.  
  
That was a week ago now and the those two matches had turned out to have another thing in common with England beaten 2-1 next time out - to Romania in '98 in the second group game - to Brazil now in the quarter finals.  
  
Ah well, better luck in four years!  
  
Anyway I'd just finished lunch when the phone rang.  
  
"Rick Francis" I answered, picking it up.  
  
"Rick, this is General Hammond"  
  
"Been a while" I didn't want to say much - my parents were hanging around and I didn't really fancy telling them that I'd spent the best part of 3 months earlier in the year on another planet!  
  
The General must have understood. He continued. "Rick, I was hoping you could do me a favour"  
  
"What kind of favour?" I didn't know how the General had got this number - didn't think I owed him any favours either.  
  
"The usual." 'Oh crap'. "I'm taking a trip to London next week - I was hoping we could talk more then."  
  
"OK! Millenium Eye, next Saturday, 3'o clock!" It would have theoretically been easier to email the assignment details over but also harder to avoid doing some serious explaining, so I was glad the meeting was face to face.  
  
"Sounds good" the General replied "Oh by the way, I'd like you to check out this website, gegenspass.de."  
  
"Allright, see you next week then." I replied, then hung up.  
  
"Who was that?" asked Mum  
  
"Ah, just one of the people I was working with in Colarado wanting to meet up in London next week - I suggested going on the Eye on Saturday."  
  
  
  
29th June 2002  
  
I'd gotten to the Eye a few minutes earlier and waited for the General to arrive. Gegenspass had turned out to be a German group who basically believed that space travel should be abandoned and the money spent elsewhere- the thing the General was probably worried about was the fact that somehow they'd found out about the Stargate program and were trying to start a campaign to have it shut down. What I was supposed to do about it I hadn't a fucking clue.  
  
"Rick?" The General was wearing a dodgy sun hat  
  
"General?"  
  
"This way."(Space this out, so that it's clearer who's saying what)  
  
A few minutes later we were the only people in a 'car' that was on its way up.  
  
I started the conversation "Interesting, was it five months ago that you chucked me out of the SGC? What's changed?"  
  
"Did you read what was on the website?" asked the General  
  
"Yeah, looks like your cover's blown" I replied, not sounding overly sympathetic. Actually that hadn't sounded too good. "I didn't have anything to do with it though, trust me, just don't know what I'm supposed to do about it, that's all!"  
  
"Perhaps you could discredit them" the General suggested.  
  
"How?" I asked "No on second thought make that why? Why do you want me to do this? Let me see, you've got command of a top secret military operation, you can call on the CIA, the NID..."  
  
"The NID are already involved in finding out who leaked the information to Gegenspass, that's as far as I'm willing to trust them"  
  
"And for the rest of the way you're willing to trust a guy who fired on one of your officers while they were on the same team?"  
  
"For the rest of the way, I'm willing to trust someone who got my best team out of jail."  
  
"OK, I'll be honest with you, I don't see how the SGC becoming public knowledge would hinder its work. Furthermore, exactly two years ago I was in a small city about 100 miles west of here, starting a new job under a false name. You know the reasons why I did that and I never planned to do it again. I didn't need to accept the Tok'ra offer..."  
  
"And a few weeks earlier you didn't need to interrupt the conversation of four American tourists"  
  
"Four American tourists?" I managed to resist laughing "You aren't honestly saying you had Teal'c covered as an American are you? He was the reason SG1 stood out like a sore thumb that night!"  
  
"Nevertheless, you didn't need to interrupt their conversation."  
  
I wasn't going to win that one so I tried another tack  
  
"Look, however I got involved in the fight against the Goa'uld, I'm out of it now. I have no attachments to the SGC, all favours have been repaid"  
  
The General looked me in the eyes "I wouldn't be so sure of that" he commented  
  
"How come?"  
  
"When I transferred you out to the Tok'ra homeworld, it was supposed to be for the rest of your life --and as you reminded me earlier on, you had fired on one of my officers on a previous mission together. And I could have quite easily put you down as MIA."  
  
"Bullshit!"  
  
"Are you sure?"  
  
I was pretty sure. However there was one part of me looking to give this a go. I'd been able to get some low-paid jobs earlier on in the summer but this was a chance to guarantee funding for the final year at Uni. This was not my saner side talking.  
  
"£1000 sterling, to be paid by cheque when this is over - take it or leave it"  
  
"I'll take it"  
  
A few minutes later and we were at the bottom again - our journey was over.  
  
6th July 2002  
  
Here we go again. The place was Heathrow Airport 3:30pm. The claim was that I was joining some of my newly acquired American mates in Munich for a couple of weeks or so. In practise I was to be met by an agent, from which agency I didn't know. All that I knew was that I was supposed to bring my passport and a rucksack - half unzipped.  
  
"Rick Francis I presume?" The guy had dark hair- mid thirties at a guess.  
  
"Who wants to know?" I asked  
  
The agent just slyly grabbed my passport out of my deliberately-half- unzipped-rucksack and placed something else in there. I zipped up my rucksack and hoped to find somewhere to take a look at my new acquisitions - preferably not the men's room.  
  
Eventually I found a relatively quiet part of the terminal where no-one was around and had a look at the stuff - the passport was American - I suppose they were easier to get hold of - the name inside was Carl Schmidt - yes with a C.  
  
The documents gave me some extra info on both Carl and Gegenspass.  
  
Carl was from Philadelphia - born and raised - but his parents were both German. However Carl's German, though good, wasn't quite fluent enough for his parents liking and so he had been given this job to improve his skills in that language.  
  
The good thing about this was that they didn't cover me as a German - my German wasn't quite that good. The thing to be wary of here was that I didn't know much about Philadelphia so I had to hope my colleagues wouldn't either.  
  
Gegegenpass had only gotten started up in 1991. It's head was a man called Felix Bröckner - who was in his mid-50s. It wasn't high profile, it mainly relied on it's Web presence. Didn't seem much of a threat really - there were already conspiracy theory sites advocating the Stargate's existence - look at how Martin Lloyd started up Wormhole Xtreme - only difference was these people did intend to shut the SGC, in both the US and Russia, down. Not good.  
  
Aim here: To 'discredit' Bröckner and/or Gegenspass. It was one thing getting information, a far trickier thing to hide it and I had a feeling I had bitten off more than I could chew. Even if I managed to 'discredit' them somehow they would probably work out what had gone on and send either 'Carl Schmidt' or perhaps even General Hammond and Rick Francis to court. And that would certainly bring down a house of cards.  
  
So I also had to prevent Bröckner from coming after me afterwards - this was not going to be easy - and I had a plane to catch!  
  
8th July 2002  
  
Gegenspass was based in Einsteinstrasse, near the centre of Munich, though slightly to the south east. The building was a decent sized office block, the sort of thing you get in the centre of any major city.  
  
I walked into reception at 10am. "Entschuldigung, Meine Name ist Carl Schmidt, Ich habe eine Interview mit Herr Bröckner." Speaking German with an American accent was going to prove an interesting experience.  
  
She replied in English "One moment Herr Schmidt" She picked up a phone and chatted in German for a few minutes "Herr Bröckner will be down in a couple of minutes."  
  
A couple of minutes later Felix Bröckner arrived. The man was quite tall, had dark grey hair and a suit. "Carl, Willkommen nach Gegenspass, my office is this way" he greeted in German  
  
Once in his office a worker poured us some coffee and we sat down and started talking.  
  
"So Carl, why do you want to work for Gegenspass?" Bröckner asked.  
  
"I don't know...there's a lot of money getting spent by my government , in areas where I'm not sure we should be spending so much. We're putting so much money into trying to get to the stars, when in my home town there are too many people on the streets. I thought I might be able to do something about that here."  
  
"This far from home?"  
  
"And my parents want me to speak better German" I laughed.  
  
"OK, well young man, I am pleased to welcome you to the company. You can start work tomorrow. Until then enjoy Munich."  
  
It looked like I'd been given the rest of the day off.  
  
Later  
  
I'd made my way to a local cybercafe, trying to think up tactics and using the Internet to help and to be honest I wasn't getting anywhere. I already had a sort of plan -  
  
From my visits to the Gegenspass website I knew that the other major player in the company was Peter Drucken. I also knew that between Bröckner and Drucken, the foundations for Gegenspass had been laid. I felt my best chance of success was in setting up Gegenspass to self-destruct by putting these two at loggerheads. That way I was unlikely to get hit by any of the debris - heck this probably wouldn't even make the papers in Germany - only problem was, how?  
  
The first idea I had was to frame Bröckner for something and make it look like he had been set up by Drucken, however that was unlikely to work, as Drucken would then deny that he had made any accusations and the game would be up.  
  
However it was going to take something along those lines for me to pull this off.  
  
I then came up with a similar idea and searched google.de for the phrase 'seelische Gesundheit', the result that came up was a website for a faculty in Mannheim a check on a map website had it down as a town a few hundred miles north of Munich.  
  
It was a start.  
  
9th July 2002  
  
First day at work for Gegenspass and as per usual I was playing Mr Nobody, office junior.remove Like the NID operation back in September the job was mainly IT based, helping out on website maintenance looking to the possibility of an English version of the site.  
  
This also gave me the chance to see how much they actually knew about the SGC. The answer was, about as much as the NID did. They knew about NID involvement as well. From what I was able to get, their source had come from the UK, a journalist referred to as Herr Adams in some documentation - though this guy's name wasn't to be revealed on the website.  
  
Apparently 'Herr Adams' had hired a hacker to break into the SGC's database, the info passed from the hacker to 'Herr Adams' who'd asked for a lot of dough for the info on one of the Stargate conspiracy websites going around. The buyer turned out to be Gegenspass.  
  
I considered letting Hammond know about the info and then decided against it - the NID might have worked this much out already. I had my own job to do  
  
12th July 2002  
  
It was late Friday afternoon, near the end of the day, and I felt I had an opportunity to finish this job. A lot of the information I had found earlier, I had needed to get at one of the regular staff terminals to do so. Not that anyone seemed to have a problem with it.  
  
For this last shot I was going to look for another piece of info.  
  
"Peter, have you got any plans as to what you plan to do once this... Stargate thing has been revealed by the US and Russian governments" I asked Druckner "They could be useful for the website."  
  
"Oh yes, good idea - there are copies on mine and Felix's domains. Do you want to do this now or Monday?"  
  
"I'll put it on to the floppy now - how long is it till this place closes?"  
  
"Everyone will be gone in about fifteen minutes."  
  
"I won't be able to put it on the website tonight then - maybe Monday"  
  
"OK"  
  
Peter logged me on to his domain "Do you want any help?" he asked  
  
"Nein danke" Peter left the room.  
  
First I found the information I was supposed to be looking for and downloaded it on to the floppy.  
  
Then I opened up Peter's email package and wrote an email to a Munich hospital not too far north of where I was  
  
My name is Peter Druckner. Eleven years ago I founded a company called Gegenspass with a friend of mine called Felix Bröckner. Recently I have become worried about him. He claims to be having nightmares and I believe it is affecting him a lot in the day time as he seems to have little energy. I believe it is very important for one of your psychiatrists to see him, hopefully on Monday, at our office in Einsteinstrasse.  
  
I finished the email off with Felix's telephone number, sent the email then deleted it from the 'Sent items' folder. My work here was done.  
  
That evening  
  
It was about 8pm - and I fancied celebrating my success with a large glass of the local beer. First, before I left my flat, I had to check in with General Hammond, so I turned on my mobile.  
  
As soon as I turned my mobile on, a call came in - from Steve. I hit the 'pick up button'.  
  
"Steve, what's up?"  
  
"Rick, what the fuck is going on?"  
  
"I'll tell you what the fuck is going on, I reckon one of your Yankee friends just tried to run me over." Steve was clearly not in a good mood.  
  
"What the fuck?"  
  
"Yeah, I know about the Stargate and I know about the Tok'ra. Told some German guy on the Internet about it as well."  
  
"You could have told me"  
  
"You could have told me why no one hardly heard from you the last few months you were Stateside. Now tell your Yankee friends not to kill me!"  
  
"I'll get the guy called off, hang on in there."  
  
The next call was to General Hammond - by my reckoning it was going to be about lunchtime at the SGC.  
  
"Hammond"  
  
"General this is Rick, I reckon I've got Gegenspass set to implode"  
  
"Well done"  
  
"Thanks. Now, how are the NID getting on?"  
  
"If you're interested, they found the leak, or rather leaks. Two British nationals, a hacker called Grant Smith and a journalist called Steve Adams."  
  
"Well, you know the guy that the AHA put in jail a year before you and I first met? I just got a call from him, he reckons one of my 'Yankee friends' has just tried to run him over. His name is Steve Adams, he is a journalist. FOR FUCK'S SAKE GENERAL, GET YOUR FACTS RIGHT!"  
  
"What do you want me to do?"  
  
"CALL THE FUCKER OFF!"  
  
"He's not mine to call off."  
  
"You've got a fucking red phone in your office, use it and get the guy called off"  
  
"On what grounds? Your friend wouldn't be the first journalist the NID has assassinated"  
  
"Well if you're not going to stop him I will"  
  
"How?"  
  
"Why do you want to know? You wouldn't try to stop me would you?"  
  
I hung up, packed my bags and hailed a taxi which took me to the airport. I then ran into the terminal.  
  
"Entshuldigung, ich brauche ein Flug nach London jetzt" I still spoke with an American accent as I was still having to use Carl's passport.  
  
One hour later and the flight was taking off. And the General's last question was still echoing in my ears 'How?'  
  
I had no weapons, I had no back up. I didn't have a fucking clue.  
  
Next up...Loose Cannon 


End file.
